


Reliving

by FelidArachnid



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Bonding, Gen, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, No Romance, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-09
Updated: 2016-11-09
Packaged: 2018-08-30 02:41:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8515417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FelidArachnid/pseuds/FelidArachnid
Summary: They met as Reyes and Amélie, but were reunited as Reaper and Widowmaker





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was just a side of their relationship that i've not yet seen addressed and I think has scope to be pretty tragic - Amélie's husband was a key member of Overwatch, and Reyes was the founder of Blackwatch, so they must have known one another. Chronologically Reaper joined Talon before Widowmaker resurfaced, so he must have met her after all the horrible brainwashing she was put through. IDK. Not sure where all the lore lines up in this but I just really really wanted to write this

Reyes never cared much for coffee; it dried his mouth out, made his belly gurgle.

  
Reaper made it black, and disgustingly bitter, and sat up late steaming his ruined face over the pungent cup. Some nights he drank it hot enough to scald his insides on the way down; other nights he’d nurse it until the sun was rising and the drink was stone cold in his stiffened hands. He didn’t care. Either way it kept him going, and the sick nausea brought on by too many cups helped him forget that he was no longer even able to fall asleep.

  
It bothered Widowmaker, the first couple of times they’d been partnered up by Talon. She didn’t like that he kept her awake with his endless pacing, and she didn’t like the constant hiss of the kettle.

  
Amélie liked her coffee expensive, and French; dark with a splash of cream.

  
Reaper scowled over the rim of his mug, staring out the window of the dingy apartment without truly seeing. Not that there was much to see anyway; Route 66 had long ceased to be relevant, and the once lively towns scattered along its length had fallen into quiet disrepair. The landscape was dry, dusty and eerily silent. Wooden shacks leaned tiredly against one another. The silence was only occasionally broken by the low buzz of a neon sign. Somehow their caustic light seemed brighter than the half-moon suspended in the hot desert sky above.

  
The wooden floor creaked behind Reaper, and although he resisted turning around, his hand tightened on the gun lying on the kitchen table.

  
He heard the tell-tale click of Widowmaker lowering her rifle, and his lip curled. “Did I wake you?”

  
She circled around to his seat by the window, silent in her bare feet. She did not reply, but he hadn’t really expected an answer. He knew Widowmaker slept cat-like, in fits and starts, waking often and never bleary-eyed.

  
Amélie had always been a morning person. Reyes never saw her up later than 10am, and always fresh-faced and brisk.

  
Slowly she lowered herself into the other chair, drawing one bare leg up against her chest. Her plain grey pyjamas were thin but she did not shiver in the night air.

  
Silence reigned. Reaper and Widowmaker were a highly efficient duo as far as Talon were concerned, and the pair were used to week-long missions together in the most isolated of hideouts. But even in life, Amélie and Reyes had never had much to say to one another, and it seemed old habits died as hard as the people that kept them.

  
“I hate these American places,” muttered Widowmaker eventually. “Nothing left here but criminals and thugs.” He knew she didn’t consider herself a criminal. When you were as good at what you did as she was, you were a _professional_.

  
“This place just gets worse and worse every time I see it,” he grunted back. “Wasn’t much to look at to start with.”

  
“Hm.” Widowmaker leaned forwards and tapped a packet of cigarettes against the windowsill, sliding one out into her outstretched palm. In silence he watched her raise one to her lips, her face briefly and eerily illuminated by the orange flash of the lighter.

  
“So,” she said curtly, exhaling a lungful of smoke into the night air and tilting her head against her palm, gazing at him. “You’ve been here before?”

  
His ruined lips twitched irritably. “…It was my – station. In Blackwatch.” He couldn’t help himself – his eyes darted to Widowmaker’s attentive face, searching for any kind of acknowledgement of the word.

 

She stared blandly back, raising the cigarette for another drag. “Did you kill a lot of people here?” Her tone was shrewd – she knew him well enough to guess at what memories he attached to this place - but there was no hint of recognition at his words.

  
Amélie had never much liked Blackwatch. Reyes recalled how she’d been opposed to it from the start, and even after his successful deposition of the dread Deadlock gang, she’d merely been coldly approving. She hadn’t trusted Blackwatch – and maybe with good reason.

  
Widowmaker released a curl of blue smoke out the window and watched it drift into the still air. “Blackwatch is long gone, non?”

 

Reaper was silent.

 

Over the rim of his coffee mug, he stared at the cold, distant woman he now only knew as his co-assassin, and recalled with an unwelcome catch in his throat the day he first met her. She’d been introduced to him as Widowmaker – he’d only heard the name before, uttered reverently amongst the Talon underlings, he knew her as the mystery sniper that was Talon’s answer to the unbeatable Ana Amari.

  
He knew her; he hadn’t expected to recognise her.

  
The Talon general stood between them had watched Reaper carefully with one eyebrow raised, testing him, daring him, coldly watching for his response as the woman Reyes had known as Amélie Lacroix walked towards him. Reaper had swallowed his sickened horror and went through the motions of introducing himself and shaking her cold, icy hand.

  
Talon had done it to mess with his head, he reasoned as he now stared at her leaning on the windowsill. And although he was loathe to admit it, it had worked. Sometimes he was Reaper, and she was Widowmaker, and they didn’t know each other beyond these single, intimate missions. But sometimes she would pull a face that was familiar, or she’d say something in just the _right_ tone of voice, and suddenly all he could see was Amélie, and suddenly he felt like Reyes again, back in the early days of Overwatch, when Gérard was still alive.

  
It was indescribably painful. It only made him feel even more as though he no longer knew who he was any more, and he couldn’t begin to put into words how he imagined Widowmaker felt.

  
As they’d completed more and more missions, spent more time in one another’s company, he’d noticed momentary lapses in their downtime together. Just little things – quiet, familiar phrases muttered under her breath; a frightened gleam in her eyes – but enough to make him wonder how much of Amélie was left, and whether she still knew him.

  
Sometimes at night he heard her screaming in her sleep. Once he’d caught her sobbing Gérard’s name. He’d locked his own bedroom door and sat against the wall in silence.

  
“Reaper.” Her voice jolted him out of his reverie. Widowmaker always had a little trouble pronouncing his name; it occupied the same awkward space in her accent that his old name – Reyes – had in Amélie’s.

  
He raised his mug and found it empty. “Yeah?”

  
“The Deadlock gang,” she said nonchalantly, stubbing her cigarette out on the table and reaching for another one. “I was saying. It was them, your old mission here, was is not?”

  
“Yeah,” he grunted reluctantly. A thought struck him. “Hey…when did I ever tell you that? ”

  
“Tell me about it,” she interrupted, her tone wistful. She had her elbow on the windowsill, chin propped up by her palm and the cigarette held between two fingers against her lower lip. His gut twisted uncomfortably as he realised he recognised the pose from Amélie sitting through some of Overwatch’s longer meetings.

  
The scarred landscape of his face burned painfully. “You know I don’t like talking about - ”

  
“Please.” The softness of her tone startled him enough to look back at her once more.

  
She gleamed slightly in the crisp moonlight, the orange glow of the cigarette the only source of warmth in her otherwise dead, cold face. Her lips were firm and unsmiling, but her eyes were soft and far away.

  
Tears were pouring down her cheeks. He watched as they dribbled off her jaw and dripped silently into her lap. She didn’t appear to notice; she made no move to wipe them away. “I want to hear about it,” she whispered.

  
Reaper let out a deep, heavy sigh. “I – it was a last-ditch job. They – Overwatch… that is, I mean, Morrison - ”

  
“Ah.” She closed her eyes, and the movement displaced a few more shimmering tears. Her long eyelashes fluttered, spiky and damp, against her cheek. “Jack.”

  
She didn’t even seem aware that she’d spoken; she merely took another draw on her cigarette and motioned to him with the other hand to continue. He wasn’t sure if he could. The familiar name had stuck in his chest, and it hurt all the more to hear it from her lips.

  
“We killed most of them,” he whispered hoarsely. “It was – our job. To do what Overwatch could not – would not – do…”

  
Widowmaker’s cigarette had gone out. The flow of tears had ceased, the remainder drying on her cheeks as she stared out the window with a strange, vague expression on her face.

  
The voice died in Reaper’s throat. He couldn’t finish the story; the names, the familiar faces, they hurt and angered him too much. Abruptly, he stood up, pushing his chair away with such force that it toppled over. “I’m going to bed,” he growled, and although Widowmaker shrugged he knew she didn’t believe him. She knew he didn’t sleep.

  
He strode forcefully to the door, but paused, one hand on the doorframe, and turned to look back at the woman silhouetted against the blue midnight sky.

  
“Leave me,” she said, without turning around.

  
Reaper disappeared, and Widowmaker was alone in the dark, empty room.


End file.
